Entries in Sales
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The latest quarterly results from Apple show that demand for all Apple products is at an all time high. 37 million iPhones, 15 million iPads, plus millions of Macs and iPods sold in just 3 months! That's an impressive result by any standard.

Well over 15 million iPad sales in a single quarter is an astonishing achievement. As you can see from the chart above, the iPad reached 15 million sales per quarter in half the time the iPhone took to break through that same barrier.

The multi-touch tablet market is all about the iPad

Given this rapid uptake and also taking into consideration the comments from Apple CEO Tim Cook, it looks increasingly likely that the iPad will soon be selling in quantities that exceed even the mighty iPhone. We would not be too surprised if that occurred for the first time at some point during 2012. Apple entered the smartphone market as a fresh faced newbie with lots to learn, the same cannot be said of the tablet market, Apple created the multi-touch tablet market. With the iPad, it currently defines the entire market. If at some point over the next couple of years Apple decide to split the iPad range into high, middle and low end devices, it's hard to see how it would not sell iPads faster than it can manufacturer them.

At the recent education focused event that saw the launch of iBooks 2, the new iTunes U app and iBooks Author (more on this soon!), Apple failed to explain exactly how schools will be able to afford thousands of iPads. We believe that Apple will address the lower end of the iPad market this year with a cheaper variant. Will this cheaper iPad be for education markets only? It's certainly a possibility, though not that likely.

As we said on Twitter recently, the iPad is now Apple's primary computing platform. We fully expect to see it mature rapidly throughout the next 3 years, to the point where only a relatively small percentage will pick a Mac over an iPad. In short, the iPad story is only just beginning and we'll be following it every step of the way!